Letters

Response to Bill O'Reilly, 4/06/04

Subj: Christianity caused the Dark Ages.
Date: 4/6/2004

To: oreilly @ foxnews

Sir:

Contrarily to what you boldly asserted on TV, the coming of the Goths and the Huns did not start the "Dark Ages." A few thousands Goths invaded because imperial fascism and state religionism had previously made dozens of millions of Romans despondent and stupid. The Huns were mostly annihilated by a combined Franco-Gothic-Roman army without lasting damage to Western civilization.
The proximal cause of the Dark Ages was the Christian terror imposed by the imperial Roman military dictatorship, as a further tool of oppression. Christianity was not a tradition of Mediterranean Antiquity, but, in a few years, it became a destruction of the mind, the spirit, and civilization itself, when the Roman empire used it as a weapon to crush the mind.
People similar to you, who exerted a "choosing," as they thought, without checking every single thought with the church first, became criminals. A "choosing" translates into the Greek "heresy," and was made punishable by death (Law passed under Roman emperor Theodosius 1, 382 CE). But perhaps employees such as you, Sir, of Mr. Murdoch, that new American billionaire from Australia, never really fear to exert a "choosing," ever since they "pledge allegiance ... under God?"

"So Help Me God," as you people are fond of saying.

Patrice Ayme'

P/S: Should you want to learn more, you can consult my web site, at Patriceayme.com (esp. the essay on religion), or the (simpler) book "The Closing of the Western Mind. The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason" (Charles Freeman, 2003). The observations above are not really new: Voltaire introduced them to Gibbons, during the Enlightenment. But the first to make them, and to act decisively on them, were the Franks, the enlightened successors of Rome, and not at all the barbarians you love to depict at Fox News.